Why abortions rose after Roe was overturned

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many expected abortion rates to drop. Instead, they rose. Here's why.

It seemed only logical after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that abortion rates would go down and births would go up.

Instead, the opposite happened: Abortions went up last year and the country’s fertility rate hit a historic low. 

More than 1 million abortions were recorded in the United States in 2023 — the highest in a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion access. So far this year, abortion rates have remained about the same as in the last six months of 2023, preliminary data show.

“The post-Dobbs world wasn’t as bad as we expected,” said Diana Greene Foster, a reproductive health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “It happened that people were denied abortions before Dobbs. It’s likely happening after Dobbs, but not to the extent that I, at least, was worried about.”

Foster predicted in 2022 that a quarter of women who wanted abortions in states with bans would give birth instead. Now, she thinks the share might be somewhere in the low single digits.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/abortions-rose-roe-overturned-why-rcna181094

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